brat — Charli XCX

Charli XCX | Atlantic Records | 7 June 2024 | 9/10

There’s a moment about forty seconds into “360” where the beat drops and Charli XCX announces herself like she’s kicking open a fire exit — loud, uninvited, and absolutely sure of herself. It’s the kind of opening statement that tells you exactly what the next forty-odd minutes are going to demand of you: full attention, a willingness to be uncomfortable, and ideally a dark room with a good sound system. brat is the record Charli xcx has been building towards since she was sneaking into illegal raves as a teenager in London, and the fact that it’s arrived as her sixth album rather than her first somehow makes it feel more earned, not less.

The aesthetic context matters here. Charli has spoken at length about brat as a product of that early rave culture, and you can feel it in the architecture of every track — the way “Club classics” treats the dancefloor not as escapism but as emotional territory, somewhere you go to feel things rather than avoid them. It’s confrontational music, but it’s confrontational in the way a good conversation at 3am is confrontational: it gets to the truth faster than politeness would allow.

“I’m so Julia, I’m so Julia / She’s so Charli, she’s so Charli”

That line from “Girl, so confusing” — the album’s most quietly devastating track — does something genuinely clever. It turns a vague public perception of rivalry into a meditation on comparison, insecurity, and the particular loneliness of being a woman in an industry that encourages you to measure yourself against other women. The Lorde remix that followed pushed the conversation further into the open, but even in its original form, the track lands with precision. This is Charli at her most vulnerable without being her most indulgent, which is a difficult line to walk.

Not everything here is that introspective. “Von Dutch” is among the most purely joyful things she’s ever recorded — a fluorescent, bouncing piece of club-pop that sounds like confidence made audible. There’s a lightness to it that contrasts sharply with the album’s more searching moments, and the sequencing is smart enough to use that contrast rather than let it become jarring. By the time we reach “Apple” — a deceptively simple track that builds into something almost hypnotic — brat has established enough internal logic that even its quieter moves feel deliberate.

What separates brat from Crash isn’t just texture — it’s intent. Crash was an exercise in conscious pop classicism, and a largely successful one, but it was Charli working within a frame she’d designed for herself. brat dismantles the frame entirely. The production, handled in collaboration with a tight circle including A. G. Cook and Cirkut, is deliberately abrasive in places — the synths on “Sympathy is a knife” have an almost physical sharpness to them, and “Mean girls” sits in a sort of uneasy melodic space that refuses to resolve into anything comfortable. These are not pop songs that want to make your life easier.

That said, the album never mistakes difficulty for depth. “I think about it all the time” is perhaps the most emotionally exposed track here, a slow-building piece about fertility, ageing, and the particular pressure women face around those subjects, and it manages to be genuinely moving without being maudlin. It’s the kind of song that you’d expect to feel out of place on a rave-influenced pop record, but brat has created enough emotional range by that point that it lands without disruption.

If there’s a minor reservation, it’s that the album’s back half occasionally loses the intensity of its opening. “Rewind” and “b2b” are both fine tracks that might function better as interstitials than as focal points — they have the feeling of palette cleansers in an album that doesn’t always need them. But this is a small complaint in the context of a record that operates at such a consistently high level, and both tracks serve the album’s pacing well enough in practice.

The broader conversation around brat — the memes, the green, the cultural moment it became over the summer of 2024 — is real and worth acknowledging, but it would be a mistake to let that noise obscure what’s actually happening musically. The best pop records create their own weather, and brat genuinely does that. It sounds like nothing else released this year, and it sounds completely like Charli XCX, which is rarer than it should be. If you want more of what this aesthetic can do, it’s worth checking out what Jade has been building in a similar electropop space on That’s Showbiz, Baby: The Encore — but brat remains the definitive statement.

brat is the sound of someone who’s spent years being told what kind of artist she should be, finally deciding she already knows.